how many disks do I have? Post: 9714

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers how many disks do I have? Post 9714 by Perderabo on Thursday 1st of November 2001 02:20:36 PM

11-01-2001

Administrator Emeritus

"format" will show all physical disks with sun. "prtconf" is also useful on suns. And "ioscan" or "sam" will do it on hp.

I'm gonna take a crack at describing controllers and targets...

Every disk and tape that you have will be connected to the computer by a cable. Data will go back and forth through that cable. The cable connects to a card in the computer. That card is the controller. Each card gets a number. So that is the controller number that people are talking about.

If you trace the cable from the card to the disk drive, you may find another cable the goes to a 2nd disk drive. Each disk drive will have two places to plug in a cable. The last disk drive should have a terminator instead of a cable on the 2nd connector. The i/o card in the computer and all the drives attached to it until that terminator is a "chain". Each drive on a chain will have an address set in some switches or a dial. And each drive on the chain better have a unique address. This address is that target number. So the disk with the target set to 2 on the first i/o card (controller 0) will be c0t2d0.

That last number will be 0 unless you have a disk array rather than a disk drive.

You can't just count the special files in /dev/dsk. If you unhook a disk drive and throw it away, the special files won't go away with most versions of unix. You can always use mknod to create a new special file. But if you do, a disk drive will not magically appear.

Perderabo

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LEARN ABOUT HPUX

diskinfo

diskinfo(1M)															      diskinfo(1M)

NAME

       diskinfo - describe characteristics of a disk device

SYNOPSIS

       character_devicefile

DESCRIPTION

       The command determines whether the character special file named by character_devicefile is associated with a SCSI or floppy disk drive.	If
       so, summarizes the disk's characteristics.

       The command displays information about the following characteristics of disk drives:

	      Vendor name    Manufacturer of the drive (SCSI only)
	      Product ID     Product identification number or ASCII name
	      Type	     Floppy or SCSI classification for the device
	      Disk	     Size of disk specified in bytes
	      Sector	     Specified as bytes per sector

       Both the size of disk and bytes per sector represent formatted media.

   Options
       The command recognizes the following options:

	      Return the size of the disk in 1024-byte sectors.

	      Display a verbose summary of all of the information
		      available from the device.  For floppy drives, this option has no effect.

		      SCSI disk devices return the following:
			Vendor and product ID
			Device type
			Size (in bytes and in logical blocks)
			Bytes per sector
			Revision level
			SCSI conformance level data

DIAGNOSTICS

       Most of the diagnostic messages from are self-explanatory.  However, one diagnostic message deserves further clarification.  If the command
       fails  to access the lunpath corresponding to a given special file, it displays the following diagnostics data, which contains device iden-
       tification and capability information:

	    device type 127 (unknown); device is inaccessible
	    iso ecma ansi rmb dtq resv rdf

WARNINGS

       As of release 10.20 of HP-UX, certain IDE devices, CD-ROMs in particular, will respond to inquiries as if they were SCSI  devices.   There-
       fore, the text "SCSI describe" in the output of the command does not definitively mean that the disk is in fact a SCSI drive (especially in
       the case of CD-ROMs).  Use to check which type of INTERFACE node, SCSI or IDE, the device's hardware path lies beneath, in order to defini-
       tively determine a drive's interface.

DEPENDENCIES

   General
       The command supports floppy and HP SCSI disk devices.

   SCSI Devices
       The  SCSI specification provides for a wide variety of device-dependent formats.  For non-HP devices, may be unable to interpret all of the
       data returned by the device.  Refer to the drive operating manual accompanying the unit for more information.

AUTHOR

       was developed by HP.

SEE ALSO

       ioscan(1M), lsdev(1M), disktab(4), disk(7).

																      diskinfo(1M)